A host of political leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, made no effort to hide their disgust with the president’s unilateral move.

But Trump always will have Lamar Smith.

The San Antonio Republican congressman, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, responded to Trump’s announcement with the kind of giddiness you get from Rihanna whenever Kevin Durant misses a free throw.

“By withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, President Trump has freed America from a bad deal that would cost billions of dollars but have little significant environmental benefit,” Smith said in a Thursday statement.

Notwithstanding the name of the committee he chairs, Smith’s belief in “sound science” would be news to Thomas Carl Peterson, the former principal climate scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Peterson talked to me about his struggles with Smith, a climate-change skeptic who seems driven to debunk all empirical evidence that conflicts with his ideology.

One of Smith’s favored tactics has been to harass NOAA scientists with onerous document requests, in a bid to find a political agenda to their work.

Beginning in 1991, Peterson worked with NOAA to build a long-term global temperature and precipitation data set, tracking precipitation back to the year 1697 and temperatures back to the early 1700s.

“And Lamar Smith requested all my emails that had the word ‘temperature’ in them,” Peterson said with a laugh, adding that the resulting email dump was ridiculously massive.

One of Smith’s theories, which he voiced in 2015, was that NOAA “expedited” a global-warming study to fit then-President Barack Obama’s “aggressive climate agenda,” namely Obama’s planned appearance at a Paris conference that ultimately yielded the climate deal Trump has abandoned.

In the study, NOAA’s team of scientists refuted existing theories that there had been a hiatus, or at least a slowdown, in global warming from 1998-2012. Smith questioned NOAA’s findings, and suspected nefarious motives.

“It still shocks me,” Peterson said, “that someone who is the head of a science committee doesn’t understand how science works. He still thinks it’s top-down.”

Peterson added: Smith “sent out an email request, because he assumed that we were ordered to get rid of the hiatus, to do some new analysis to prove there was no hiatus. So he requested all our emails that had anything to do with Barack Obama or the head of NOAA telling us to do this stuff.

“The evidence he got from that was that there were no emails showing that we were told to do this work or to prove that there was no hiatus. But he didn’t take no for an answer.”

Smith’s assumption that climate science is a top-down politicized process might have something to do with the fact that climate-change skepticism tends to operate that way.

For example, the Koch brothers — operating out of self-interest to protect their own industrial bottom line — led a climate-change resistance movement that distributed more than half a billion dollars between 2003 and 2010 into various organizations to wage a public campaign against climate reform, according to Jane Mayer’s 2016 book, “Dark Money.”

For years, the conservative argument against policies that would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions was that the United States couldn’t achieve much on its own, and it wasn’t fair to tie the hands of American industry while China and other countries polluted the environment with impunity.

That’s why the Paris accord was important. It was nonbinding, but it got most of the international community to buy in to a set of reasonable long-term goals for emissions reductions.

Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement, and the response of Smith and his Republican allies, suggests it doesn’t matter whether we go it alone or work in conjunction with the rest of the world. For the skeptics, the only good climate reform is no climate reform.